Shoes we can't afford.
There’s an article in Huffington Post – which strives really hard to be feminist without actually affecting any socioeconomic divisions in America – praising photos which show “every body is gorgeous.”
In every picture where you can see a foot, it’s clad in a heel at least four inches long, and with one exception, pointed-toe.
I’m fed up with liberals defining beauty as women of any size or color but always dressed in clothes which constrain them. I grew up in Seattle at a time a serial killer was running loose. It was years later and in another state that Ted Bundy was finally captured. As a result, almost every woman I knew was taking precautions: taking karate and self defense classes, going to presentations where a growing number of experts came to explain to us how not to think like victims.
I still remember one wonderful trainer who stood in front of us and explained quite simply that women were brought up to think of people threatening us as attackers. “That’s not useful,” she said. “You need to think of them as targets.” And then she proceeded to show us that on the body of the largest and strongest man imaginable there were vulnerable points we could go after and harm.
I took karate. The woman who taught that class later survived an assailant’s attack in her own home, after she’d been blinded, by fighting back. She taught us how to do pushups on our knuckles. (By the end, I could do 50 at a time, which was pretty good for the class. They were real pushups, not the ones the gym classes taught where girls only pushed up from their knees.)
The most important recurring theme of all the self defense teachers was, however, not about fighting. It was about running.
“Never wear clothes you can’t run in,” they all advised us. That included the unspoken advice, “Wear clothes you can fight in.” The primary point of fighting was to get away and then run, so it all fit together.
Part of the entire point of women’s clothing has always been to make them vulnerable and unable to move freely. The method of doing that has changed – instead of our mothers, we now have a constant barrage of images telling us to bind our feet, restrain our waists, grow our hair and wear skirts too tight to run in – but the results remain the same. The fact that some clothes are designed by artifice to cripple women temporarily (and in many cases permanently, from corsets and shoes on up) is better known to the historians of the second wave of feminism than some more modern feminists who’d rather not think about how their own lives are constrained by their clothing “choices,” and how they model body damage as femininity to others.
It’s true, if your labour consists of walking across a hall, or at worst, a building, you can wear the clothes which display you as privileged. But few working class women can wear such clothes except sex workers, who require it for their job. Domestic workers, service workers, construction site workers simply could not wear such shoes and do their jobs. Clerical workers can, and are required to in some cases, but most office workers wear shoes they can run in to and from work, damaging their bodies only as required for their jobs or fulfilling every woman’s implied second job, getting a man.
So – can you fight in heels? A little (and you can take them off and use the heel as a weapon to blind your assailant, assuming he lets you pause to take them off in the first place and you know how) but you definitely cannot run faster than the average man in them. This is especially true if you live in a place where climate plays a factor. Women generally know this and dress in shoes which at least help you walk, if not run, in snow, for example; but I have yet to see a picture of a woman dressed in snow boots where she’s portrayed as beautiful and sexy, unless they’re selling the boots.
Can you run in a skirt? Depends just how tight it is. A pencil skirt without much give which goes past your knees is going to provide a tantalizing shuffle and that’s it. It may seem better to wear the shortest skirt possible, but ask yourself: can I climb a tree in it? In fact, try it. My experience is that the bark from trees is very painful even in shorts, and if you feel driven by social pressure not to show your underpants, skirts are even worse.
In other words, if you like really really short skirts, a skort is the way to go. But it’s not fashionable because it’s not sufficiently constraining. Victims are far, far more attractive than healthy, comfortable women. On the other hand, predators target people who look like promising victims, so you’re safer by the way you dress before fight or flight is even a concern.
Long hair is useful to someone chasing you because it provides them with something to grab. Perhaps that doesn’t concern you – fine. Ever worked with machinery with waist length hair? I have. You learn quickly to tie it all back. Even a word processor occasionally can entangle just enough hair to be painful – and “real” machines are much more dangerous. But short hair, like pants instead of skirts and comfortable shoes, is a mark of aging in females – while it’s a mark of ordinary life for men of any age
The mark of a woman constrained by their clothing is, ultimately, the mark of class; that she is marked by privilege and dependent on it for her living. In the US, it began with the rise of the middle class a couple of centuries ago: a man with a “well-dressed” wife showed that he was a good provider, that he could afford a woman who didn’t produce part of the household economy herself. It began as a mimic of the wealthiest classes and then became more or less taken for granted. The signs of privilege still exist though far fewer economic units (“families”) today actually can afford one of the partners not participating in the household economy, whether doing the home labour of children, housework, and cooking, or in the public marketplace.
In fact, notice the upscale magazines and their increased emphasis on crippling shoes and constraining clothes – and youth, who may find these constraints irritating but haven’t yet discovered the permanent damage they cause to bone structure, foot shape, and so forth, let alone the danger they are if you can’t fight back – and you will see the class divisions, and the contempt for those who don’t wear these class markers, ever-growing.
In the meantime, here’s a little exercise I always assigned my gender and communication students, who were wont to say, “Yes, it used to be bad, but it’s changed.” Please do try it.
Go window shopping for shoes. Notice the men’s and women’s shoes for the same functions – parties, work, hanging around the house or running to the grocery store. Record your observations. What are the differences? What are the similarities? Try on a pair of shoes designed for the gender you aren’t for work or an important evening event. What do you notice then?
Note: If you want to check the article which triggered this commentary,here's the link.
A few hours later: Wandered back to see if anyone had read this, and found that clothing is a trigger for many. I like to answer people's comments, but I think there are too many already to answer all -- sorry, but thank you! Just wanted to re-emphasize that a lot of clothing differences are to keep class distinctions alive and well, not just to police all women as a group. And also that what clothes you wear may be an individual choice, but what clothes mean is a cultural one.